Twitter and Vine Announces More Game-Changing Features

By Peter Roesler

President, Web Marketing Pros

Since becoming a publicly traded company, Twitter has made great strides in making the platform more accessible to business owners and marketers. As was discussed in a recent article on this site, consumers have pushed back against some of the proposed changes, like changing the character limit.

This means Twitter has had to become inventive on ways to improve the platform without changing the core of what makes Twitter fun for consumers. To that end, Twitter has announced a few new changes that will hopefully make the platform better for marketers and users.

The biggest change involves video. Twitter is a platform based on brevity, and when they initially launched video content on Twitter, they kept video times short. According to a recent statement from the company, both Twitter and Vine will be extending videos time limits to 120 seconds. This tactic is another way for Twitter to make Tweets more in depth without changing the character limits.

According to a report from Marketing Land, “On Twitter it’s pretty straightforward: videos won’t be cut off at 30 seconds any longer. Advertisers and certain publishers working directly with Twitter can still post video ads and videos, respectively, that are up to 10 minutes long.”

Things will work a little differently with Vine. VIne started off as Twitter’s platform for quick six-second videos. So just as Twitter couldn’t directly extend the character limit without annoying fans, Vine had to tread lightly when thinking of a way to extend the length of videos. So on Vine, the roll of six-second clips would continue, but clicking on the video would open the longer video.

While the company hasn’t elaborated much yet, Twitter and Vine are also working on new revenue streams as a way to entice content creators to stay. Besides their old rival in YouTube, Twitter and Vine are facing stiff competition from other video sharing platforms like SnapChat and Facebook. Marketers and content creators can expect to hear more about these plans in the near future.

The other big news out of Twitter is sadly for iOS users only, but the news is still pretty good. One of the challenges of social media is getting meaningful information about the demographics and interest of fans of a social media page. Twitter is launching an app called release of Twitter Engage a US-only iOS application that is “intended to give all content creators, especially marketers, celebrities and public figures easier ways to connect with fans and influencers.”

With Engage, real time insights will be provided to those who use the app, inclusive of notifications for when influencers follow the connected account or mention the account. The app will also provide real-time insights such as recent number of likes, retweets, mentions and impressions are served via a dashboard.

Another useful feature planned for Engage includes providing content review and performance activity metrics, so that content creators can also see data around each individual conversation that they’ve initiated. Twitter plans to release similar companion apps for Vine and Niche.

Despite the limitations of platform, Twitter is continuing to find ways to attract consumers, marketers and content creators. We’ll have to wait to see if the changes bear fruit. For more news about social media marketing, read this article on changes happening on Twitter and Facebook.